What is your outlook for this cross-country season from a coaching prospective?
We expect to be better. We lost Lavera Morris from the women’s team and she was a steady performer (2:06 @ 800 thru XC) throughout her career so we will miss her. Everyone else returns, Andrea Halasek (All SEC in ’07), the Ortman twins and Leah Ryan (nursing an injury) and Katherine Peterson both with a year of cross country experience now. We have one newcomer (Dana Jamieson) and we’re hopeful she will make a contribution. We don’t have much depth, but we should race in a very tight pack.
We anticipate the men’s team will be substantially better based primarily on the new additions to the team. We will be young, but I think we have some talented, competitive guys who are legitimate distance runners. We bombed at the conference meet last year, so we weren’t as bad as it seemed, but we hope to rise to the top half of the conference and continue to improve from there.
What are some of the team’s goals?
The goal is always to continue to improve and regain our competitiveness in the Conference. The women have another opportunity to be very competitive in our conference and qualify for the national championships.
The goal for the men’s team is to reestablish our competitiveness in the conference and continue to build toward becoming a national caliber team
Favorite workout that really shows how the team is progressing?
I don’t put too much stock in any one workout on a given day. We look for progressive improvement in training through-out the season with an increasing eagerness to race. I think regular season race results are the best indication of real progress.
What should fans be looking for this season out of both teams?
Improvement
A phrase that best summarizes the cross-country programs at UK.
Reestablishing competitiveness
Lastly, what is the best way for runners in the state to contact UK about being recruited?
Send a letter with information on their academic background (test scores and grades), including confirmation of registration with their NCAAEligibilityCenter (include social security number & birth date) and all the track events in which they compete and their best performances. Video of track races would be a welcomed too
Send to:
Don Weber
JoeCraftCenter
University of Kentucky
Lexington, KY40506
What is your outlook for this cross-country season from a coaching prospective?